Online Junkyard: eBay Shopping - Junkyards, Now

The traditional junkyard is dead. R.I.P., dear junkyard. We shall miss thee. A change has been under way for the last decade or so, and we've noticed it at the self- service junkyards we frequent in Los Angeles County. Useful parts are hard to find. Of course, useful is a relative term. If you're in need of parts for an Accord, Civic, or Corolla, no problem. But finding a car with a V8 engine in the front driving the wheels in the rear has become much more difficult.

We must stipulate that because the ratio of four-cylinder, front-drive cars to V8, rear-drive cars manufactured since the '80s heavily favors the former, and as the latter end their life cycles, one can only assume to find greater numbers of front-drive econoboxes in wrecking yards. However, if the Camaro and Firebird were manufactured until 2002, and the Mustang never ceased production, where are they? We have only seen a handful of fourth-gen F-cars and SN-95 Mustangs in the junkyards, and they have either had their entire drivetrain plucked before being set out in the yard or they are so badly damaged that nothing useful remains.

All magazines, including CC, are guilty of propagating some variation of the following statement: "We got this engine out of the junkyard, and it cost us next to nothing." You will find this somewhere in an article detailing the "budget" build of something. If the build is a small-block Chevy, yeah, it's probably true. Carbureted and TBI 350s are still available in junked work trucks. But if it's referring to an LS1 or new Hemi, it may be time to call the truth police. Your author has personally never seen any variant of the LS engine in the junkyards. Ditto for the Hemi. Yet GM and Chrysler have churned out hundreds of thousands of them in trucks and SUVs since the late '90s, so where are they? For sale in the online junkyard - ebay, that's where.

Online junkyard shops are the new junkyards. They have been for several years, but we've been slow to acknowledge it. Over the last couple of weeks, we've spent a huge amount of time scouring the Internet looking for used parts. At other jobs, this would be cause for dismissal, but here at CC, we call it research. Anyway, the proliferation of parts available in ebay's online junkyard is astonishing. You could piece together just about any domestic engine made in the last 60 years with a PayPal account and some time to kill on a Saturday afternoon. So to get your creative juices flowing, here are some of the engines and combinations we stumbled across.

The Bricks And Mortar Junkyard

Let's start with the parts we believe are still available at your local junkyard. You'll have to sift through all the front-wheel-drive stuff to find them, though.

Online Junkyard: The Digital Swap Meet

So what do you do if you want a later modular engine, a new Hemi, or an LS anything? You have to go online. Among other things, the Internet has spawned a number of mainly online businesses selling car parts, many of them dealing specifically with late-model cars. Check out the random sample we came across while searching eBay.

Car Parts from Insurance Auctions

You may have noticed a common thread among the eBay sellers we spoke with: They buy their cars from insurance auctions. We suspect that's where all the late-model parts are going, rather than ending up in our favorite Pick Your Part junkyards in Wilmington and Sun Valley, California. That got us thinking, How do we get in on that? After some preliminary digging, we discovered you need to be a licensed automobile dealer to bid in auctions like this. Rules vary among states, of course, but this is food for thought. Clearly there is a market for these parts, and the business owners we spoke with said they were able to make enough money selling parts from salvage cars to support themselves. In this economy, that is impressive.

Way Out There

Do you ever type in ridiculous search words to see what results you will find? We did just that (all in the name of research, of course) and found this after searching “unique engines.” According to the description, this is a Bristol Siddley Olympus 22R turbojet engine. It was the prototype engine for the British Aircraft Corporation’s TSR-2 Military Aircraft Program. We’re not sure what that means, but it sounds important. Shipping to your door is possible! END